One of the most powerful moments, thus far, in Jacobs’s narrative is the end of Chapter 12. She describes she and her fellow slaves standing in their designated corner of the local church, waiting until all the white people — who begrudged them just that small piece of God’s grace — took communion. Only then, under the watchful eyes of their oppressors, could they exercise their faith. Jacobs and her fellow slaves could not even worship God freely. Jacobs points out the irony of the situation, noting that in the very church of the “meek and lowly” man who said “God is your father, and all ye are brethren,” she and her fellow slaves are treated as less than human and virtually denied religion.
And the religion they were force-fed was a twisted version of the New Testament Christianity Southern whites pretended to practice. God for the African American in Southern religion was the Ultimate Master, whom they were to obey unquestioningly and serve gratefully as they did their white masters. Not even in religion were slaves free of oppressive forced servitude. But if allowed to come to God in their own way, Jacobs said, “many of them are sincere, and nearer to the gate of heaven than sanctimonious Mr. Pike, and other long-faced Christians, who see wounded Samaritans, and pass by on the other side” (Ch. 13). In other words, the slaves achieve a faith truer than that of their hypocritical masters.
Jacobs also uses religion as a “call to arms,” so to speak, for Northern women. She praises their international missionary efforts, but challenges them to accomplish as much at home:
“I am glad that missionaries go out to the dark corners of the earth; but I ask them not to overlook the dark corners at home. Talk to American slaveholders as you talk to savages in Africa. Tell them it was wrong to traffic in men. Tell them it is sinful to sell their own children, and atrocious to violate their own daughters. Tell them that all men are brethren, and that man has no right to shut out the light of knowledge from his brother. Tell them they are answerable to God for sealing up the Fountain of Life from souls that are thirsting for it” (Ch. 13).
Jacobs’s call to arms is more than just a challenge to Northern Christian women to champion her cause. She also seems to placing responsibility for the abolishment of slavery squarely in the hands of Northern women. If they will it and work their will on the men in their influence then Northern women can alter the destiny of an entire race and change the future of a nation. That is a powerful message to deliver to women at a time when they had no obvious political will. This idea that a strong “will” can overcome apparently insurmountable odds is crucial to Jacobs’s growth from slave to free woman.
One of the other exceptionally powerful aspects of Jacobs’s work is the intimate view of a mother’s agony that she paints. Each stroke of her pen must have caused her such anguish to relive — describing the jailing of her children, their sale, her suffering as she caught glimpses of them through the crack in her dark hole of a hiding space. And out of this darkness arose prose that’s almost poetry:
“I had a woman's pride, and a mother's love for my children; and I resolved that out of the darkness of this hour a brighter dawn should rise for them. My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each” (Ch. 16).
And this will in Jacobs is born of her motherhood. At this point there are some interesting comparisons we can make about Douglass’s and Jacobs’s fight for freedom. Douglass’s growing masculinity and sense of his own manhood prompted him to seek his freedom in the North. Jacobs’s responsibilities as a mother drive her take desperate action. And while Douglass metaphorically (and literally) wrested his freedom from his oppressors, Jacobs had to “will” herself free.
